Image: Zach Dischner | Flickr

Does God’s vision for our life, church and ministry have to be big to be real?

I keep hearing that it does. Sayings like “if your vision isn’t big enough to scare you, it’s not from God” have been popular for quite some time now. Apparently we’re ...

Image: From cover of Small Giants, by Bo Burlingham

Better churches become bigger churches. Right?

Maybe not.

That’s been the rule of thumb for businesses, too. And it’s no more true there than it is for us.

As it turns out, constant growth doesn’t work for the majority of churches or businesses. Yet they can still ...

Image: Sergio Boscaino | Flickr

The Sunday morning pass-the-plate offering has always been a reliable predictor of the commitment level of church members.

Long before they started leaving – often before many started complaining – people would express their dissatisfaction with a church by stopping ...

Image: Bert Kaufman | Flickr

A church of 50 people needs to be pastored like a church of 50 people.

You can’t act like a church of 500. Or even 100. The systems, methods and relationship dynamics simply won’t fit.

So how can a church grow, either in its size or effectiveness, if we’re only ...

Image: Raffaele Diomede | Flickr

The pastor’s office is a time-honored tradition whose moment has come and gone for a lot of us.

Over the last 35-plus years of ministry, I have spent thousands of hours in my office. Joyful, frustrating, heartbreaking, boring, wonderful, life-changing hours. Hours spent ...

Image: Art Poskanzer | Flickr

Yesterday, I was back in my home church after being gone for a month doing conferences and taking some vacation time with my wife, Shelley.

We’ve taken time away before, of course, but this time it was different. Because when I came back yesterday, for the first Sunday ...

Image: Joel Kramer | Flickr

Small churches can have a big impact.

Especially today, with the power of social media and other new ways of communicating.

But also, because so much of our lives are lived online, people are having a renewed longing for more personal, tactile, face-to-face experiences. These ...

Image: Knar Bedian | Flickr

Imagine a hallway full of doors, all of which lead to the same destination.

All your life, you’ve seen people go through one particular door, so you use it, too. But one day you try to go through that door and it won’t open for you.

What do you do?

Insistence says, ...

Leading a church is often a lesson in managing and overcoming frustration. Hopefully not all the time. But there are those seasons...

This week I’ve learned a great lesson about triumphing over extreme difficulty and frustration from a very unlikely source – a hotel ...